1. I voted this morning and was very pleased to see a big crowd! I don't remember the last time I had to wait in line to vote at 7:30 a.m. It was amusing to see visual confirmation of what a Democratic neighborhood I live in. The stack of Republican primary cards was pretty much untouched.

2. So apparently there was a Super Bowl the other day (this is a sporting event involving spheroids, I'm told) and the local team won. Many people are very excited about this. In fact, someone on my flist was looking for Super Bowl slash last night and someone else was writing Super Bowl slash. I was happy to hook the two of them up!

This morning my work neighborhood is having a ticker tape parade for the winning team. As completely uninterested as I am in sports, it was nonetheless kind of fun to see so many happy, excited people outside this morning.

I want a thriller where someone in the crowd gets a shredded bit that points to a CEO-ordered murder! After the parade, he madly gathers up all the "tickertape" he can and heads back to his cell-like lonely apartment (his wife threw him out a year ago and he has no access to his beloved daughter even though he's been clean and sober for five months) to reassemble the pieces.

He becomes increasingly obsessed with the Quixotic task but through a slip of the tongue and a series of coincidences, the evil corporation figures out that he is on to them.

There are little plaques in the sidewalk on Broadway with all the ticker tape parades listed - reason and date. I've worked downtown since 1980 but I don't remember seeing them until recently. But they could have been there all along - I can be very clueless! There have been a bunch of them since I moved to NYC.

I, too, am jealous that you got to see the parade. I'm so happy for baby Manning. I'm a lifelong Saints fan, but seeing as how he's Archie's boy and played at Ole Miss, I've kept an eye on him and I have hated how the New York sports press have nagged and dogged on him the last few years. Maybe now they'll leave the poor boy alone!

Ah, I won't try to convert you to my religion then. (And football is a religion in the South...) Just suffice to say that the current Giants' quarterback is the youngest son of a beloved football family centered in New Orleans where the oldest Manning played professionally for more than a decade. He begot his sons, Peyton and Eli, so that they might lift up the football programs at Tennessee and the University of Mississippi, and we, their devoted followers, have watched over them as they've graduated and been handed off unto mostly unappreciative and unworthy Yankee hands. ;)

Seriously, it is a religion. The fact that both boys have now won superbowls probably won't help it any either. :)